Award-Winning Book Offers Cultural History of Color TVhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2019/1/18/New_Book_by_Susan_Murray_Offers_Cultural_History_of_Color_TV
Editor's note: in her book&nbsp;Bright Signals: A History of Color Television (Duke University Press), MCC Associate Professor Susan Murray positions the story of color television within a broader cultural history of twentieth-century aesthetics. In ...Editor's note: in her book Bright Signals: A History of Color Television (Duke University Press), MCC Associate Professor Susan Murray positions the story of color television within a broader cultural history of twentieth-century aesthetics. In tracing the development and commercial introduction of the technology, she considers the way the idea of color was debated, theorized, and monetized. The book has received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ 2019 Kovács Book Award for advancing scholarship in the field.

You begin the book by saying that color television was a hard sell. What explains the cultural anxiety surrounding electronic color in the postwar period?

There are a number of factors at play in the anxieties which circulate around color, but in terms of the television industry specifically, color television (when compared to monochrome) was considered by many to be too complex, expensive, technologically cumbersome, required too much bandwidth and was challenging to stabilize and manage. Sponsors, on the whole, were reticent and consumers were not convinced a color set would be worth the higher price tag. Color had to bring added value to television without being excessive, garish, or unrealistic and early demonstrations revealed that the correct balance was difficult to achieve. You see similar concerns around the use of Technicolor in film during the 1920s- 1930s.

Bright Signals tells how networks sold color television as a new way of seeing. How was this marketed to both advertisers and household viewers?

Yes, it not only represented a new aesthetic for television but also promised a peculiar viewing experience for audiences. Color television was said to produce a unique level of depth and immersion, not even found in color film. It was often described (in marketing and press coverage) as having a “pseudostereo effect,” or giving the illusion of being in three dimensions.

Additionally, networks and set manufacturers made the case (often citing marketing research or psychological studies) that color maintained a unique psychological and emotional hold over viewers that made them more attentive, engaged, and open to the images and claims made before them. In other words, color television was positioned as the ideal form of modern American consumer vision.

Which early TV color programming had the most impact on home viewers? Did these shows succeed in furthering the networks’ goal of a“placing electronic color into the public imagination”?

There was a long period—only 10% of households had color sets even in 1965—when there was only a small audiences of viewers watching color TV at home. However, consumers could also see programs in department stores, in supermarkets, in hotels, and other public places. Network programmers were aware of this and in the 1950s tried to schedule color programming during the day at times of peak traffic stores selling color sets. They also focused on using color for types of programs that were made significantly better by the use of color—sports (you could see team colors and the ball moving across the field more clearly), spectaculars (one-off lavish musical productions with top talent and involved sets) and art and nature documentaries. Also, NBC would identify their color programs with the network ID that carried the tagline “This program is brought to you in Living Color” and their new peacock logo (since they were the network most invested in color) to make viewers aware fo the fact that they might be missing out on a dimension of the program if they were watching on their black and white sets.

Who was one of the more intriguing figures you came across in your archival research?

One group of figures were the network ‘color girls’ who stand before cameras in a studio before the broadcast of any color program while technicians and camera operators made color adjustments in order to best achieve “true” fidelity of flesh tones. Perhaps not surprisingly due to systemic and institutional structures of racism, all of these women were white—fair skinned with usually blonde or red hair. CBS used a woman appropriately named, Patty Painter, from their very earliest color demonstrations and NBC used Marie McNamara. Both these women became celebrities of sorts, appearing on TV programs as “Miss Color TV’ and being profiled by magazines and newspapers.

]]>2019-01-18T13:59:00ZMCC Conference in Berlin Convenes Global Media Scholarshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2018/11/8/MCC_Conference_in_Berlin_Convenes_Global_Media_Scholars
The conference "Transubstantiating Transmission: Walls Become Ports Become Channels,&rdquo; held on October 12-13, included six MCC faculty members, four PhD students, and one MCC alum. Several distinguished German media theorists, art curators and ...The conference "Transubstantiating Transmission: Walls Become Ports Become Channels,” held on October 12-13, included six MCC faculty members, four PhD students, and one MCC alum. Several distinguished German media theorists, art curators and scholars participated as presenters or as discussants.

Papers spanned topics from voice forensics and asylum to computation and carceral reform. Over the course of two days, presenters covered key concepts at the heart of 21st century media and culture in Berlin, a city with a deep history of transformation in regimes and infrastructures.

“The discussions were intense, collegial and generative,” says Professor Arjun Appadurai, who hosted the event. “There was general agreement that the conference was a great success and strengthened the tie between MCC and NYU Berlin as well as between NYU and German-based media studies scholars.”

NYU Berlin arranged visits to the Humboldt Forum (site of Berlin's most ambitious cultural and museological project) and to the Stasi Museum and Archives, a major resource for the documentation of the East German communist state before 1989.

Professors Wallace and Secunda were recognized with Steinhardt Teaching Excellence Awards presented to select faculty each year who have made significant contributions to the intellectual life of the School through innovation in their pedagogy and a commitment to mentorship inside and out of the classroom.

Aurora Wallace is Director of Undergraduate Studies at MCC. She has led the department’s Honors Program since its inception. This fall she begins a 3-year residency at NYU Paris, where she will oversee the Department’s new MCC in Paris initiative.

Senior Annie Tressler considers her experience in the Honors Program the highlight of her time at NYU: “Professor Wallace’s genuine care for her students is evident in everything she does. From helping undergraduate students in their original research projects to providing a space to ask questions and receive feedback, she makes MCC seem small and personalized, despite the large size of our department. Experiencing Professor Wallace’s class was the most rewarding part of my college career, and many of my classmates agree!”

MCC alumna Alexandra Dickinson concurs: "I had the pleasure of learning from Professor Wallace in three classes over the course of my studies. One that particularly stands out was Crime, Violence and the Media. The class combined a little bit of a lot of things: New York history, film noir, architecture, and how these elements combined to impact real people. As a newcomer to New York, her teachings and perspective helped give me a sense of those who came before me."

Nominated by his students, Professor Brunton took home the teaching award administered by the Steinhardt Undergraduate Student Government and presented at its annual gala last week. He researches the history and theory of computing and digital media technologies. His forthcoming book Digital Cash: A Cultural History examines the rise of cryptocurrencies. His course offerings include Hacker Culture & Politics, Money as Media and Critical Making.

]]>2018-05-11T16:03:00ZMedia in Pakistanhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2018/4/30/Media_in_Pakistan
A fellowship from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies will enable MCC doctoral student Asif Akhtar to conduct dissertation research in the India Office Archives at the British Library for six months next year. With this extended archival ...A fellowship from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies will enable MCC doctoral student Asif Akhtar to conduct dissertation research in the India Office Archives at the British Library for six months next year.

With this extended archival work, Akhtar intends to situate Pakistan’s current media landscape within a historical framework of media regulations under colonial rule. When General Pervaiz Musharraf came to power in 1999, he privatized what had been the State’s 40-year monopoly of news television. Pakistan introduced a robust regulatory system, channels and viewership proliferated, and a new sphere of televisual politics emerged.

In this transformed media environment, subsequent decades have witnessed new ways of thinking, speaking, and participating politically, for governors and the governed alike.

To understand this interplay between media and politics today, he will compare it to another moment in south Asian history when media change reshaped the public sphere: the 19th century colonial regulations of print technology and political discourses issued by the East India Company.

“The working hypothesis of the study is that with changing media technology, the regulation of such technology becomes the prima facie political tool for governors to demarcate the limits of political discourse, critique and censure of policies – the changing means of disseminating political discourses, by default, changes the practice of politics itself," explains Akhtar.]]>2018-04-30T17:35:00ZMCC Student Among Inaugural Urban Doctoral Fellowshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2018/4/26/MCC_Student_Among_Inaugural_Urban_Doctoral_Fellows
First year PhD student Sandeep Mertia has been named an NYU Urban Fellow. The new university-wide program aims to increase collaboration and scholarly discourse among a diverse set of faculty and students engaged in urban research. The competitive ...First year PhD student Sandeep Mertia has been named an NYU Urban Fellow. The new university-wide program aims to increase collaboration and scholarly discourse among a diverse set of faculty and students engaged in urban research. The competitive fellowship is awarded annually to 8 NYU students and lasts for the individual’s entire tenure at the university.

With a background in engineering, Mertia has spent the last several years as a Research Associate at the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in Delhi. He joined the doctoral program in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication this year to continue his research on data-driven urbanisms and computational cultures in India. His scholarly interests center around technology and computational knowledge production in India, resonating with larger discussions around development, smart cities, and infrastructure in the global south.

In an article published last year for the journal Fibreculture, Mertia examines the social and technological implications of the techno-urban or ‘smart city’ phenomenon.

]]>2018-04-26T18:26:00ZAlexander Galloway Receives Berlin Prizehttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2018/4/25/Alexander_Galloway_Receives_Berlin_Prize
MCC Professor Alexander Galloway is among the recipients of the 2018-2019 Berlin Prize&mdash;a semester-long fellowship administered by the American Academy in Berlin.
The highly coveted prize is awarded annually to scholars, writers, composers, ...MCC Professor Alexander Galloway is among the recipients of the 2018-2019 Berlin Prize—a semester-long fellowship administered by the American Academy in Berlin.

The highly coveted prize is awarded annually to scholars, writers, composers, and artists from the United States who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields. Fellows receive a monthly stipend, partial board, and accommodations at the American Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

Galloway will spend the semester developing a research project on the prehistory and culture of computation, widening the historical scope to nineteenth-century media, such as photography, simulation, sculpture, and games. Topics will include the lesser-known histories of nineteenth-century German and French practitioners of chronophotography, such as Albert Londe, and an examination of mathematician Nils Aall Barricelli, who wrote algorithms to create artificial organisms that reproduce and mutate. Galloway will also consider French filmmaker and philosopher Guy Debord, who, in the 1970s, established a commercial game company.

Alexander Galloway is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where he focuses on media theory and contemporary philosophy. He received a BA in modern culture and media from Brown University, and a PhD in literature from Duke University. As a programmer and artist, Galloway’s projects include Carnivore, a networked surveillance-tool based on the eponymous FBI software (awarded a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2002), and Kriegspiel, based on a war game designed by Guy Debord. He is founding member of the Radical Software Group (RSG).

Galloway has held visiting posts at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, and is the author of Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minnesota, 2014), The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004).

Global media agency Weber Shandwick and the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication have joined forces to diversify the study and practice of media.

The NYU at Weber Shandwick: Masters in Residence program is focused on increasing the number of technology-engaged, globally-savvy, diverse, future media and communications professionals by reducing barriers to graduate education and industry advancement for historically underrepresented students.

Selected scholars receive funded tuition in the department's MA degree program; personalized academic mentoring from a designated NYU faculty member; a part-time paid position during Fall and Spring semesters at Weber Shandwick, with professional training from senior executives who also serve as mentor on a creative cumulative project driven by the student; and eligibility for summer employment after students’ first year in one of Weber Shandwick’s global offices.

]]>2018-01-18T17:44:00ZProfessor Robles-Anderson Recognized by the Society for the History of Technologyhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/11/7/Professor_RoblesAnderson_Recognized_by_the_Society_for_the_History_of_Technology
An article coauthored by Associate Professor&nbsp;Erica Robles-Anderson has received the 2017 Mahoney Prize from the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society, a research division within the&nbsp;Society for the History of ...An article coauthored by Associate Professor Erica Robles-Anderson has received the 2017 Mahoney Prize from the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society, a research division within the Society for the History of Technology. In 'One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech, coauthors Robles-Anderson and Svensson highlight the enduring ubiquity of PowerPoint software and its relative absence from any scholarly critique:

"For more than twenty-five years PowerPoint has shown up at lectures, events, talks, sermons, and briefings. What once were distinct occasions have now become formatted in the genre of the commercial demonstration. PowerPoint provides a common infrastructure, a template for the organization of speech, and for the logic of argumentation. As such, it shapes and produces the world. Nevertheless, the application has been almost entirely unremarked upon by critical scholars of media, technology, and the digital humanities. Why? Despite extraordinary claims about the total domination of algorithms, protocols, the digital, bits, and information, the material conditions of mundane software use go largely under-recognized as key sites for cultural work."

In the award citation, the committee praised the article's originality:

"Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson provide a highly original and insightful history of PowerPoint’s design, development, and use. They convincingly argue how PowerPoint has become a dominant and indispensable medium for communication, yet like many other forms of ubiquitous software programs and packages it has undergone minimal critical analysis. As such, the conditioning of knowledge production with PowerPoint is overlooked, and once distinct situations and settings such as classrooms, press conferences, and church sermons become more alike. Overall, their article stands out for astutely engaging with communication theory, as well as making significant IT history and historiographical contributions by analyzing PowerPoint within the context of precursor technologies such as the DuPont Chart Room, white boards, and overhead projectors."

About the Mahoney Prize:The Mahoney Prize recognizes an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The Mahoney Prize commemorates the late Princeton scholar Michael S. Mahoney, whose profound contributions to the history of computing came from his many articles and book chapters. The Mahoney Prize is awarded by the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) and is presented during the annual meeting of our parent group, the Society for the History of Technology.

]]>2017-11-07T13:51:00ZNYU’s Incubator for Disability Research and Activismhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/9/22/NYUs_Incubator_for_Disability_Research_and_Activism
The field of disability studies looks at the historical, social, and legal circumstances that shape the experience of disability. It also recognizes that disability is not a matter of discrete impairments &mdash; but rather an opportunity for ...The field of disability studies looks at the historical, social, and legal circumstances that shape the experience of disability. It also recognizes that disability is not a matter of discrete impairments — but rather an opportunity for coalition or identification.

For the past decade, a group of NYU faculty—led by Mara Mills, associate professor of media, culture, and communication, and Faye Ginsburg, professor of anthropology—have been working to bring attention and action to disability issues. Their work laid the foundation for the new NYU Center for Disability Studies, which launches this fall. Starting this month, the NYU Center for Disability Studies will be housed at 20 Cooper Square, providing a new space for programming and collaborations.

We spoke with Mills, an expert on the intersection of disability and media, about the new center:

What is the mission of the NYU Center for Disability Studies? We see our Center as an incubator for disability activism and critical disability studies research on the NYU campus and beyond. We coordinate a cross-school minor in disability studies and work closely with the undergraduate Disability Student Union. With the Provostial Working Group on Disability, Inclusion, and Accessibility, we address specific infrastructural barriers on campus. Recently, the working group has improved the signage at Bobst and introduced model classrooms in GCASL that are accessible for both faculty and students. We also run a wide range of public events with emerging and established scholars, activists, artists, designers, and filmmakers. We collaborate with a broader network of disability studies initiatives in New York City, including faculty groups at Columbia, CUNY, and Fordham.

What kind of programming and activities can we look out for in the coming months? We’re bringing several outside scholars and activists to campus this fall, such as DJ Savarese, the first nonspeaking autistic student at Oberlin College and star of the 2017 film DEEJ, and Lydia X.Z. Brown, editor of the recent anthology All the Weight of our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. We also host a monthly colloquium that showcases NYU research in the field of disability studies. Anyone interested can join our listserv for details about upcoming events.

Many of your exciting collaborations have focused on the intersection of disability and the arts. Can you describe one of these projects and what NYU brings to the table? With the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, we co-sponsored a 2011 artist residency and graduate student summer school on the topic of Arts Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation. Many of the student participants have become important figures in the field. Hentyle Yapp has recently been hired as an assistant professor in the Tisch Department of Art and Public Policy. Another participant, Kevin Gotkin, now co-directs the Disability Arts NYC Taskforce (DANT), one of the Center’s community partners. We look forward to expanding our collaborations with the many other outstanding local disability arts programs, like Reelabilities Film Festival and Whitney Museum Access Programs.

]]>2017-09-22T20:09:00ZProfessor Hegde Wins Prestigious Charles H. Woolbert Research Award from the National Communication Associationhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/9/11/Professor_Hegde_Wins_Prestigious_Charles_H_Woolbert_Research_Award_from_the_National_Communication_Association
Radha S. Hegde, Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, has received the National Communication Association&rsquo;s 2017 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award.
Given annually, the award honors a journal ...Radha S. Hegde, Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, has received the National Communication Association’s 2017 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award.

Given annually, the award honors a journal article or book chapter that has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena.

“The Communication discipline has a long tradition of exceptional scholarship,” National Communication Association Executive Director Paaige K. Turner said. “Radha Hegde’s contributions are noteworthy, and we are proud to honor her with this award.”

Hegde’s research and teaching focus on gender, transnational feminism, media flows, migration and globalization and media flows. Her recent book Mediating Migration (Polity Press, 2015) narrates aspects of the migrant experience as shaped by the technologies of communication and the social, political and cultural configurations of neoliberal globalization.

]]>2017-09-11T18:26:00ZFoundations: A Remedy, With Shortcomings, to the Journalism Crisishttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/9/5/Foundations_A_Remedy_With_Shortcomings_to_the_Journalism_Crisis
Nonprofit journalism organizations have made notable civic contributions, but fall short of offering a strong critical alternative to the market failure and professional shortcomings of commercial journalism, finds a new study from NYU&rsquo;s ...Nonprofit journalism organizations have made notable civic contributions, but fall short of offering a strong critical alternative to the market failure and professional shortcomings of commercial journalism, finds a new study from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

The study, published online in the journal Journalism, describes both the possibilities and limits of the foundation-supported nonprofit model.

“In the ongoing financial crisis in U.S. journalism, philanthropic foundation-supported nonprofits are increasingly hailed as the remedy to the lack of civic-oriented news production. This study questions whether foundation-supported news organizations are an adequate solution to what ails journalism,” said Rodney Benson, professor and chair of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s author.

U.S. journalism – unlike that of Western Europe – has long been thoroughly commercial, with only a very small public media sector. Nevertheless, from the 1960s through the 1990s, media companies were able to turn a profit while also producing civic-oriented news, including investigative, public affairs, and international reporting.

This “win-win” compromise between commerce and public service began unraveling before the turn of the century, with media companies seeing drops in revenue driven by the rise of the internet. As a result, they cut newsroom jobs; local, national, and international public affairs reporting, as well as investigative reporting, were hit particularly hard by the reductions in staff.

In the mid-2000s, philanthropy emerged as a possible way out of the journalism crisis, and nonprofit journalism began to grow. Relying heavily on grants from philanthropic foundations – such as Ford, Gates, Open Society, Knight, and MacArthur – nonprofit journalism is seen as a means of transcending the previous compromise between commercial and civic needs in order to focus solely on public service. Successful national (ProPublica) and local (Texas Tribune, MinnPost) nonprofit news organizations have launched in the past decade.

While foundation support has been welcomed by news organizations, their investment is relatively small. Annual commercial spending to support news operations has fallen $1.6 billion since 2008, according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, yet Benson noted that only about $150 million per year – less than one-tenth of this amount – is currently being invested by foundations specifically in news organizations.

To understand who makes the decisions at foundations and nonprofit news organizations – and whether this influences the resulting journalism – Benson conducted an analysis of the professional and educational composition of boards of directors at commercial news organizations, foundations, and nonprofit news organizations. He found that business leaders and financial elites dominate the oversight of all three types of organizations, though to a slightly lesser degree at foundations and nonprofit news.

In addition, Benson found that project-based funding from foundations may skew media attention toward issues favored by donors. Media organizations dependent on project-based funding risk being captured by foundation agendas and are less able to investigate the issues they deem most important.

Benson also looked at what foundations ask in return for their support and found that nonprofit news organizations are often stuck trying to reconcile their “impact” and “sustainability.” Foundations put nonprofits in a bind with their competing demands to achieve both civic impact, via circulation of free content, and economic sustainability, via paying audiences and corporate sponsors. This dynamic ultimately creates pressure to reproduce dominant commercial media news practices to capture wide audiences or provide “infotainment” – or alternatively, orient news for small, elite audiences.

“The Catch-22 is that ‘impact’ as defined by foundations is not ‘sustainable’ as defined by foundations,” Benson said.

Despite his criticisms, Benson stressed that foundation-supported nonprofits tend to focus more on public affairs and investigative reporting than most commercial media. In particular, he praised the outstanding investigative reporting of ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, and other leading nonprofit news organizations.

In order to overcome the limitations of foundation-supported journalism, Benson calls for reforms – including more long-term, non-project-based, and no-strings-attached funding by foundations.

“Despite the language of civic duty that surrounds the foundation world like a golden haze, there are often specific strings and metrics attached to grants, which can create the possibility or appearance of a conflict of interest,” said Benson.

He also recommends more innovative and democratic funding through small donors and crowdfunding, more effective modes of distribution that reach beyond elite and partisan silos, and increased funding and greater autonomy for public media.

The study was funded in part by the Swedish Ax:son Johnson Foundation – which provided the grant with no strings attached. Benson’s article is part of a special issue of Journalism devoted to the topic of “media capture” by government, corporations, or nonprofit organizations, edited by Anya Schiffrin, professor of international media at Columbia University.

]]>2017-09-05T17:08:00ZNominated by their Students, Three MCC Faculty Win Teaching Awardshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/5/10/Nominated_by_their_Students_Three_MCC_Faculty_Win_Teaching_Awards
Associate Professors Mara Mills and Paula Chakravartty, and Clinical Assistant Professor Jamie Bianco, have received 2017 New York University teaching awards.
Mills is the recipient of NYU Steinhardt&rsquo;s Teaching Excellence Award, which ...Associate Professors Mara Mills and Paula Chakravartty, and Clinical Assistant Professor Jamie Bianco, have received 2017 New York University teaching awards.

Mills is the recipient of NYU Steinhardt’s Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes consummate teaching at the university. A scholar of media technologies and disability, she is working on two book projects: one entitled On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering and a second exploring print disability and the emergence of new reading technologies (like Talking Books). NYU students have assisted Mills with these projects, collaborating on research and the digitization of media they’ve unearthed in diverse archives.

"I took a large 400-student lecture class with Professor Mills and she made me feel like the only student in the lecture,” says undergraduate honors student Seth Loftis. He went on to work with Mills for his honors thesis. Seth describes her as an invaluable mentor, her teaching as “hands-on and invigorating,” and credits Mills for teaching him how to conduct archival research. “I am honored and incredibly lucky to have taken a class with Professor Mills and I feel privileged to have had her as my thesis adviser."

Students of Paula Chakravartty voice similar admiration of her acumen as a teacher. “Professor Chakravartty is someone who challenges me to become a more critical scholar,” says current doctoral student Rachel Kuo. Rachel and her peers nominated Chakravartty for a Nia Award, which recognizes the achievements of NYU community members for enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice in their work at NYU.

Chakravartty's research spans global media, critical race theory, and politics. Her courses take a transnational approach to topics in labor, race, inequality, and class. Students commend Chakravartty for centering her scholarship outside of the U.S. and for engaging feminist scholarship and scholars of color in her own work and in her syllabi.

At the awards ceremony honoring Chakravartty, her students thanked her for teaching them to “think globally and, fundamentally, more humanely.”

Jamie Bianco received an award from the Steinhardt Undergraduate Student Government recognizing her “outstanding commitment” and contributions at the school. A digital media theorist and artist, Bianco joined MCC in 2013, and has since launched the MCC Media Lab, a digital media incubator, and several associated seminars blending media theory and practice: Creative Coding, Critical Making, Workshop in Digital and Computational Media, among others.

With the Media Lab team, Bianco has organized an annual digital media showcase in the department, where students present projects exploring the intersection of technology and social commentary.

In nominating Bianco, one anonymous student wrote:

“With Professor Bianco’s encouragement and guidance, we’ve not only begun to learn more about our individual topics, but we’ve learned how to use our skills as media creators to have a real life effect on them. Out of all the professors I’ve ever had within my years at Steinhardt, she has given me something that I know will stay with me for a long time.”

The department congratulates all three faculty members on these recognitions.

]]>2017-05-10T19:26:00ZCFP: 'Mediated Populisms' The 2017 Neil Postman Graduate Conferencehttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/3/23/CFP_Mediated_Populisms_The_2017_Neil_Postman_Graduate_Conference
CFP Deadline: Monday, May 15, 2017Conference: Friday, October 6, 2017
For more information and to submit an abstract, please visit&nbsp;postmanconference.org.
At 3:30 a.m. on November 9, just after the 2016 U.S. election results were announced, ...CFP Deadline: Monday, May 15, 2017Conference: Friday, October 6, 2017

At 3:30 a.m. on November 9, just after the 2016 U.S. election results were announced, The New York Times published an article entitled “How Did the Media—How Did We—Get This Wrong?”. In the piece, four NYT correspondents struggled to find answers to how the media—they, themselves—might have partially abetted the electoral outcome. Their concerns reflect the contradictory position of news media facing authoritarian populist political figures. According to political communication scholar Gianpietro Mazzoleni, savvy media use (often articulated through media critique) is indispensable to the success of populist political figures, regardless of ideology. [1] Mazzoleni claims that news media have undergone a process of “popularization,” increasing their focus on personalities over political content, thereby lending themselves more readily to the “diffusion” of populist ideas. [2] Can populism exist independently of its mediation? And if media are involuntarily complicit in the spread of authoritarian populism specifically, what room do they have for resistance?

In this conference we will explore the relationship between “populism,” across ideological spectrums and national boundaries, and media—that is, the practices, economies, and politics of information circulation, production, and consumption through various industries, networks, and technologies. If we understand populism to be a political “logic” rather than orientation, as Ernesto Laclau famously argued in 2005[3], how is this logic mediated differently across a range of political alternatives? In what ways does the conflation of political logic and orientation foreclose political possibilities? How are multiple techniques and technologies—old and new—leveraged to assert or deny populist discourse? Crucially, this conference is interested in the relationship between the charge of “populism” perpetuated by information industries, its cultural and technological mediation, and the equating of divergent political platforms.

This conference invites scholars to interrogate the role of media in the ongoing global rise of populist leaders and movements. For example, how do we understand the similarities that bridge these groups—their anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and ethno-nationalist foundations—while each has emerged within distinct economic, racial, and religious contexts? How can these similarities hold when national media industries are shaped by distinct market pressures and degrees of government regulation? With the election, nomination, and/or rise of leaders from Modi to Erdogan, Trump to Berlusconi, Le Pen to Orbán, and the implementation of nativist political maneuvers like Brexit and immigration bans, how have media represented these figures and actions as anti-establishment? As representative of the desires of “the people”? Can populism be said to have globalized? How have media promoted facile comparisons between leaders of opposing political movements, e.g., Castro and Chávez in Latin America to Trump and Erdogan in the U.S. and Turkey? As today’s right-wing populisms amplify anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, what are media’s responsibility to their viewerships?

Further topics of consideration might include: the production of populist nostalgia; how algorithmically customized or personally curated news sources nurture and solidify popular followings; mediated predictors of human behavior, such as polling or behavioral analysis of social media use in relation to the securing of a populist base; historical examples that shed light on today’s context; the denigration of class politics through facile use of the term “populism”; the “logic” of populist representations and re-presentations through text, image, video, and sound.

In considering the role and responsibility of media users, professionals, and scholars in resisting authoritarian populism, this conference calls for an investigation of industries, markets, algorithms, networks, policies, technologies, and practices as they shape politics and media landscapes. Possible frames of analysis include (but are by no means limited to):

]]>2017-03-23T20:08:00ZHow Do We Know What to Believe? Media Literacy in 2017http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2017/2/27/How_Do_We_Know_What_to_Believe_Media_Literacy_in_2017
The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Center for Communication will host &ldquo;Media Literacy: Be Your Own Critic&rdquo; on Monday, March 6, 2017 from 6:30 to 8 pm.
In this panel discussion, media thought leaders and ...The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Center for Communication will host “Media Literacy: Be Your Own Critic” on Monday, March 6, 2017 from 6:30 to 8 pm.

In this panel discussion, media thought leaders and front-line journalists examine lessons learned from the 2016 White House run, the growth and prominence of fake news, the status of investigative reporting, and how to know what to believe.

The event’s speakers include:

Andrew Kaczynski, senior editor and founding member of CNN's KFILE, the leading investigation team for the social, mobile generation. KFILE is widely praised as a "scoop team," known for breaking news by scouring the internet through research, fact checking, and investigative reporting. Kaczynski and KFILE have exposed controversial statements, deceptions, and hypocrisies from politicians—both in office and on the campaign trail. Kaczynski comes to CNN from BuzzFeed, where he started as a political reporter.

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). Lipkin has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the country. She launched the first ever Media Literacy Week in the U.S., developed strategic partnerships with media companies such as Participant Media, Nickelodeon, and Twitter, and speaks often about the importance of media literacy education.

Eli Pariser, co-founder of Upworthy. Pariser has dedicated his career to figuring out how technology can elevate important topics in the world. He joined MoveOn.org in 2001 and served as executive director from 2004-2009. During that time, MoveOn revolutionized grassroots political organizing by introducing a small-donor-funded and email-driven model that has since been widely used across the political spectrum. He also co-founded Avaaz.org, which is now the largest online advocacy organization in the world totaling over 30 million members.

Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent and host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” will moderate the event. Prior to joining CNN, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times.

The event is free for students and faculty and $10 for non-university attendees. Tickets must be reserved through the event’s website, as space is limited. Reporters interested in attending should contact Rachel Harrison at 212-998-6797 or rachel.harrison@nyu.edu.

About The Center for Communication (@CenCom)The Center offers free educational programs to thousands of students each year, led by industry leaders and innovators. About 4,500 college students and professors attend the Center’s 40 seminars each year to learn about the latest developments and career opportunities in all fields of media. The Center was founded in 1980 by longtime CBS president Dr. Frank Stanton—a staunch proponent of the highest standards in journalism and fierce defender of the First Amendment—to bridge the gap between the media industry and academia. For more information, visit www.centerforcommunication.org.

About the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU (@mccNYU)Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) is a department within NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, advancing scholarship in all areas of media, technology and society, with expertise in global media, digital technology, and media history. To discover more about MCC, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc.

About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development (@nyusteinhardt)Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development prepares students for careers in the arts, education, health, media, and psychology. Since its founding in 1890, the Steinhardt School's mission has been to expand human capacity through public service, global collaboration, research, scholarship, and practice. To learn more about NYU Steinhardt, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu.

]]>2017-02-27T15:06:00ZMCC Professor Is Founding Editor of New Online Journalhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/12/20/MCC_Professor_Helps_Launch_New_Online_Journal
Associate Professor Mara Mills is among the founding editors of the new biannual journal&nbsp;Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.&nbsp;
Catalyst&nbsp;was conceived to expand the feminist and critical intellectual legacies of science and ...Associate Professor Mara Mills is among the founding editors of the new biannual journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

Catalyst was conceived to expand the feminist and critical intellectual legacies of science and technology studies (STS) into theory-intensive research, critique, and practice. The journal publishes scholarly research articles, research-based art and media work, book reviews, news in focus, among other forms.

Themes addressed in special issues consider black studies and feminist STS, disability, and the politics of care. An issue on digital militarism contained an article by MCC Clinical Assistant Professor Isra Ali on feminism, militarism, and the War on Terror.

A new issue Nothing/More: Black Studies and Feminist Technoscience, released earlier this month, situates topics in STS within an interdisciplinary black studies scholarship. The editors write, "in many ways, [this volume] follows from a large body of work in STS that has charted and critiqued the troubled making of Blackness as a biological, medical, legal, and social category apart from 'the human.'”

The issue includes an article by recent alumnus Beza Merid (PhD 2016), which examines a public service announcement (PSA) campaign that relied on black stand-up comics to deliver health messages about stroke symptoms to African Americans. In Stroke's No Joke, Merid argues that this PSA, and other such interventions that imagine race as a set of cultural signifiers, overemphasizes the role of cultural differences in racial disease disparities while ignoring the structural causes of these asymmetries.

]]>2016-12-20T13:15:00ZMCC Professor Receives Award from the Future of Privacy Forumhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/11/23/MCC_Professor_Receives_Privacy_Papers_for_Policymakers_Award
The Future of Privacy Forum announced that a paper co-authored by MCC Professor Helen Nissenbaum was one of five academic papers to receive its annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award.&nbsp;The paper, Privacy of Public Data, is pending ...The Future of Privacy Forum announced that a paper co-authored by MCC Professor Helen Nissenbaum was one of five academic papers to receive its annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award. The paper, Privacy of Public Data, is pending publication.

The award recognizes the year’s "leading privacy research and scholarship that has been judged most useful for policymakers in the United States Congress, in federal and state agencies, and around the world."

The January 11 award ceremony will be hosted by Senator Edward J. Markey and Congressman Joe Barton and Congresswoman Diana DeGette, co-chairs of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her eight books include Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with MCC Assistant Professor Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010). Her research has been published in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as studies of values embodied in design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.

]]>2016-11-23T09:53:00ZResearch Grants Fund Summer Fieldwork for Two MCC Doctoral Studentshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/9/26/Research_Grants_Fund_Summer_Fieldwork_for_Two_MCC_Doctoral_Students
Angela Arias-Zapata and Colette Perold received grants from the Tinker Foundation for travel to Latin America to conduct pre-dissertation research. The intent of the Tinker funding is to &ldquo;allow students to familiarize themselves with ...Angela Arias-Zapata and Colette Perold received grants from the Tinker Foundation for travel to Latin America to conduct pre-dissertation research. The intent of the Tinker funding is to “allow students to familiarize themselves with information sources relevant to their studies, conduct pilot studies and preliminary investigations, and develop contacts with scholars and institutions in their respective fields.” Both Arias-Zapata and Perold spent much of the summer planning and conducting their research in Colombia and Brazil, respectively. We spoke to both via email about their research interests and summer activity. —Editor’s Note

Angela Arias-Zapata’s destination was La Chorrera, a village located in the Colombian Amazon, an area rich with the Hevea trees whose latex-like sap is the main ingredient in rubber. La Chorrera houses Casa Arana, once the headquarters for the former Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. Here, tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants experienced mass enslavement, torture, and killings during the rubber boom of the 1900-1930s.

Arias-Zapata is researching initiatives within the country to memorialize traumatic periods in Colombian history; the rubber boom and the thousands of civilian deaths resulting from the past 30 years of armed conflict serve as two prime examples. She is seeking to understand how attempts to define the past are shaped by the storyteller—the state’s official discourse and the counter-discourse advanced by numerous community-led initiatives across the country. These endeavors involve negotiating the contested narratives about Colombia’s past and reaching consensus on how best to commemorate them.

Arias-Zapata stayed with a local family in La Chorrera who helped facilitate her introduction in the tight-knit community. While there, she blogged for NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies website.

Your visit this summer was your first time conducting fieldwork. What proved to be the most useful part of this experience?

This was my first time conducting fieldwork for a project of my own design. I had been a research assistant in 2007 for a project on education in a neighboring region. The most useful part of this new experience was being able to see how my planned methodology worked in practice. This forced me to be flexible and modify the ways in which I collected information. This experience also showed me how important it is for researchers to be open to unexpected information, which may change the focus of their interest or even the very questions of their inquiry.

Can you share examples of narratives you encountered during your research this summer that were in tension with one another?

One way of thinking about the tensions between narratives in historical memory is to assume that they are based exclusively on opposition. However, in the particular case of La Chorrera, in the Colombian Amazon region (my fieldwork site), the character of these tensions proved to be much more complex than that. Official policies on memory and the projects that emerge from them are motivated mainly by two elements: one is a desire to bring reparations to communities that the state failed to protect from violence carried out by illegal armed actors. The other is a desire for reparations in communities in which it was the state that carried out the violent acts. The idea of creating a museum next to the Casa Arana building (the place where thousands of indigenous peoples were enslaved and tortured during the rubber boom in the 1930s) is, then, part of attempted reparations to the descendants of those victims.

However, in the case of the indigenous communities that inhabit the region, the period of slavery was not as devastating as the religious rule that came after. The survivors (most of them orphans) were placed under the responsibility of the Capuchin monks, who forced them to forget their spiritual beliefs and their language. For the community of La Chorrera, what is important about the museum project is that, on the one hand, it allows them to negotiate official narratives of memory directly with the state. On the other hand, it could be incorporated in their own attempt to recover their culture from the imposed oblivion that they were subjected to.

Last month Colombia brokered a (likely) end to its decades-long civil war. How might the efforts to memorialize past suffering be impacted by the possibility of reconciliation?

Official efforts to memorialize past suffering in Colombia are part of the current reparation and reconciliation policies. These policies originated in the context of previous peace agreements with armed groups other than the FARC. Mainly in the one that took place in 2007 with the paramilitary armies known as AUC. That process was not the end of the conflict, because there were other illegal armed groups still active (the FARC and the ELN guerrillas). Since then, efforts to memorialize past suffering on the part of the state have taken place at the same time as new violent events.

Real peace is not on the table yet, since the ELN guerrillas and an important number of gangs created by ex-paramilitary combatants are still active. However, an atmosphere of relative peace after the agreement with the FARC would mean that institutions, social movements, and communities would be able to work on memorialization projects with a lower risk of being threatened or associated with a specific side of the confrontation. Nevertheless, since the FARC will become a legitimate political and social actor after the peace agreement, their version of the past and their own memorialization initiatives will be part of the public debate. The ethical challenge that Colombians will face is huge in this sense. Decades of an anti-communist political landscape, as well as the damage that the FARC has done to the country, will make it difficult for the citizenry to listen to these new narratives. New outbursts of violence could emerge from the right wing political groups as they refuse to accept the existence of those narratives.

*******************************

Embarking on a study of the critical history of Brazil’s 10,500-mile border, Colette Perold spent six weeks this summer in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Central to her investigation has been the country’s increasing preoccupation with border defense, its attempts to monitor migration and trafficking, natural resource oversight in the Amazon—and how these converge in the name of climate security and the drug war. The state-sponsored SISFRON project is a primary source of interest for Perold. A $13 billion virtual “wall” of technology (drones, satellites, sensors) devoted to monitoring everything from drug and arms traffickers to CO2 emissions and deforestation, the project launched in 2011 and was originally slated for completion in 2023. Since its federal funding dried up toward the beginning of Brazil’s recession, it is now being financed in piecemeal form at the local level. SISFRON is a joint military and police infrastructural program packaged in environmental and humanitarian planning; embedded fiber optic cables in the Amazon’s estuaries are advertised to bring high-speed internet to millions in the poorest areas of Brazil’s western Amazon as the army builds out the connectivity base of its operations.

Borders have featured consistently in Perold's work. Her undergraduate thesis "Facing Tijuana's Maquilas: An Inquiry into Embodied Viewership of the U.S.-Mexico Border" received Harvard University’s Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly research. As a first-year doctoral student, Perold made use of summer fieldwork to narrow the scope of her dissertation topic: conducting interviews with Brazilian scholars and delving into national archives.

Climate security is a fairly new concept. How do you define it, and how does your research engage with this topic?

After the Cold War, and with increased coordination in the mid-2000s, military strategists in the global North began to see climate change as a threat to national security, and churned out numerous influential reports for near- and long-term military strategy in preparation for the associated instability. The military embrace of climate change as a security threat—or “threat multiplier,” in military parlance—responds to the effects of climate change, not its causes. It envisions containing the impact of extreme weather events and climate-related conflict in vulnerable areas, predominantly in the global South. At the same time, it aims to preserve access to natural resources for the people and nations with the capital to maintain their status quo in the wake of environmental degradation and disaster. As such, we can consider “climate security” to be the militarized response to the threat climate change poses to sovereignty and human vitality.

Some use the concepts “climate security” and “environmental security” to raise the impending prospect of runaway climate change to the level of military concern in order to rally support for issues that have historically fallen on deaf ears or met corporate censorship. Within this framing, to “secure” is to preserve or nurture. But this use has significant limitations due to the ease with which “security” concerns give way to military oversight.

Terminology aside, at stake in the climate security debates is the central role that armies play in exacerbating climate change. Militaries (along with the militarization of government activities, police, and commerce) are widely believed to be the world’s largest institutional crude oil consumers and play a definitive role in securing extraction projects that accelerate global carbon emissions—and their own ongoing operations. Militaries and small-scale or private security forces must make themselves less relevant, not more, if we are to take seriously the task of climate change mitigation.

In my work moving forward, I will be demonstrating the ways that opposition to climate security is more than mere pacifism; that it is intimately woven into the ongoing war on drugs (with a focus on the U.S. and Brazil); and that it has a prehistory in military preoccupation with what is often understood as the “natural” environment.

You describe the Brazilian government’s portrayal of SISFRON as an “all-seeing, all-knowing component of Brazil’s high-tech modernizing agenda.” How is this communicated to the public and how is it received by the Brazilian people?

Something that initially surprised me when I started looking into SISFRON, well before this research trip, is the extent to which the Brazilian public has been unaware of the government's increased spending on border monitoring over the past decade. While Brazilian news consumers may hear about danger and trafficking on the border through government speeches and media hype, they are by and large unaware of the costly infrastructural and intelligence-integration efforts deployed to tackle the threats said to be emanating from the region. The lack of awareness was initially striking to me, coming from the U.S., home to one of the most trafficked and hysteria-provoking borders in the world.

The reasons for the lack of awareness are many (from the size of the border to its location in the Amazon to its comparatively low level of migrant traffic) but here's what's key: I went into the project thinking a discourse-analysis approach to the study of the Brazilian defense sector's PR would be a worthwhile contribution to critical studies of militarism, but it's now clear to me how removed from reality a project based in assumptions about the power of security-sector PR would be. Both embrace and aversion to militarism are always historically rooted in their immediate social contexts, so studies that claim new findings by analyzing isolated PR documents tend to have a limited impact. I'm glad to now be refocusing on the heart of the issues I was first drawn to in studying SISFRON: impediments to demilitarization, the root causes of state violence, and the military logic connecting climate security to the drug war.

You conducted substantial archival research in Rio’s National Archive. What kind of material were you seeking? Any particular item that surprised you, or influenced the trajectory of your future research?

I became interested in the initial response to drug trafficking in Brazil in the 1970s and early 1980s. The military dictatorship was at its height in the 1970s and financing a massive colonization program to increase human settlement in the Amazon. This story is well known—it was a period of mass deforestation, road-building, and military expansion. But it was in the mid-to-late 1970s that the trafficking of coca-derived illicit drugs from the Andes began to enter through the Amazonian borders into Brazil, facilitated by this military-sponsored development, new transport routes, and free trade initiatives in the Amazon (e.g., the Zona Franca in Manaus). For several reasons, and unlike other South American countries (Colombia most notably), Brazil ultimately rejected the heavy hand of the U.S. militarized response to trafficking in the region.

Likely because of both the Amazon colonization program and, later, inflation caused by the debt crisis, the dictatorship's response to drug trafficking in the Amazon during this early moment in the trade was either stifled or censored, and to this day remains understudied. But it’s an important moment for understanding today’s drug war in Brazil, particularly the military programming linking natural resource depletion, climate change adaptation, illicit drug commodity chains, and urban poverty. I found rich archival material on the regime from this period: some on government censorship, some from the Amazon development authority SUDAM, some on specific infrastructural projects. While I have to go back to the existing literature on this period to assess the significance of this material, I can say for now that I caught a major case of archive fever while there, and I’m so looking forward to picking up this part of the project again as soon as I can get back.

]]>2016-09-26T15:17:00ZMCC Symposium Explores Contemporary Art in China in Anticipation of 2017 Guggenheim Exhibitionhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/9/14/MCC_Symposium_Explores_Contemporary_Art_in_China_in_Anticipation_of_2017_Guggenheim_Exhibition
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and NYU Steinhardt&rsquo;s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication will host Art and China after 1989: New Perspectives. The symposium, which includes 15 emerging scholars in the field of contemporary Chinese ...The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication will host Art and China after 1989: New Perspectives. The symposium, which includes 15 emerging scholars in the field of contemporary Chinese art and global art history, will take place on Friday, Sept. 30 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NYU (239 Greene Street, Floor 8).

The event is a research initiative held in conjunction with planning for the upcoming exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 2017.

Co-organized by the curators of the exhibition – Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Adviser, Global Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, and Phil Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing – as well as Lily Chumley, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, the symposium invites 15 young scholars to present their recent research on contemporary art and visual culture from China. The full symposium program can be viewed at the event’s website.

]]>2016-09-14T12:33:00ZActivist Hashtags: Counterpublics and Discourse Circulationhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/8/19/Activist_Hashtags_Counterpublics_and_Discourse_Circulation
A new journal article by doctoral candidate Rachel Kuo examines the ways in which hashtags frame and drive racial justice discourse. The piece, published in the latest issue of New Media &amp; Society, focuses on the usage of hashtags ...A new journal article by doctoral candidate Rachel Kuo examines the ways in which hashtags frame and drive racial justice discourse. The piece, published in the latest issue of New Media & Society, focuses on the usage of hashtags #Solidarityisforwhitewomen and #NotYourAsianSideKick on Twitter as a form of contestation and counter discourse.

Kuo draws from network analysis and critical technocultural discourse analysis to map message circulation within online enclaves of users—on Twitter, but also throughout popular media sites like Jezebel, Essence, and Huffington Post.

]]>2016-08-19T16:43:00ZResearch Looks at How Racial Inequality is Produced Onlinehttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/8/17/Research_Looks_at_How_Racial_Inequality_is_Produced_Online
Internet users tend to navigate between websites in a racially segregated way, despite pathways that provide equitable access to different sites, finds a new study by NYU&rsquo;s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The ...Internet users tend to navigate between websites in a racially segregated way, despite pathways that provide equitable access to different sites, finds a new study by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The findings are published online in the journal Information, Communication, and Society.

Discussions about racial inequality on the web have been going on for decades, but few studies have attempted to demonstrate whether and how systemic racial inequality might form on the web.

“We know that people do racist things on and using the Internet – but looking beyond individual, interpersonal accounts of bigotry, how does systemic racial inequality form in the digital world?” asked Charlton McIlwain, associate professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s author.

McIlwain designed a study to conceptualize how race is represented and systematically reproduced online, specifically looking at how users navigate the web’s structure and how that structure influences users’ navigational patterns. He used the lens of racial formation theory, which conceptualizes how institutions draw on prevailing racial common sense to produce advantages and disadvantages that flow to racial groups.

]]>2016-08-17T11:01:00ZRise of China’s Culture Industrieshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/8/6/Rise_of_Chinas_Culture_Industries
A new book by Professor Lily Chumley examines the emergence of China&rsquo;s creative economy as&nbsp;&ldquo;culture workers,&rdquo;&nbsp;tasked with developing new imaginaries to stimulate consumption in the post-socialist marketplace, burst onto ...A new book by Professor Lily Chumley examines the emergence of China’s creative economy as “culture workers,” tasked with developing new imaginaries to stimulate consumption in the post-socialist marketplace, burst onto the art, design, film, architecture, fashion, and advertising scene. In Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China (Princeton University Press), Chumley traces thirty years of state efforts to cultivate these culture industries. Interventions in higher education, urban planning, and public discourse, demonstrate the Chinese government's role in shaping new forms of creative labor and aesthetic commodities.

Chumley draws on years of fieldwork in China's premier art schools, seeking to understand the elaborate "performance of creativity" and the value produced through innovation. The book includes ethnography, oral histories, and analyses of contemporary Chinese art, popular media, and propaganda.

Watch a short video produced by the Asia Society, in which Lily Chumley speaks about the role occupied by Chinese artists and designers in relation to the state.

Lily Chumley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, Steinhardt. She is an anthropologist with interest in semiotics and political economy, and has active research projects on education, the culture industries, and consumer finance in China. Her book, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China, is based on over two years of fieldwork in Chinese art institutes and test-prep schools supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The book is based on a dissertation that won the Richard Saller Prize Prize for the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She has published papers in Anthropological Quarterly and Anthropological Theory. She is co-organizer of the working group Oikos: Gender, Kinship, Money, Economy at the Institute for Public Knowledge.

]]>2016-08-06T10:38:00ZMCC Doctoral Candidate Receives Prestigious Mellon/ACLS Fellowshiphttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/5/10/MCC_Doctoral_Candidate_Receives_Prestigious_Mellon_ACLS_Fellowship
MCC PhD candidate Liz Koslov is among an impressive group of Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellows selected from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants through a rigorous peer review process. Her thesis Retreat: ...MCC PhD candidate Liz Koslov is among an impressive group of Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellows selected from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants through a rigorous peer review process. Her thesis Retreat: Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate-Changed City probes the social and cultural consequences of community-organized retreat from the coast.

Based on nearly three years of fieldwork on Staten Island, beginning shortly after Hurricane Sandy, Koslov's research follows the experiences of residents who successfully lobbied the government to buy out their storm-damaged homes and neighborhoods, which are being demolished and returned to wetlands.

Conducting extensive interviews with people involved in different facets of this collective retreat, including homeowners, renters, community leaders, activists, engineers, and government officials, Koslov develops one of the first ethnographic studies to depict the cultural practices and social processes that mediate the effects of climate change.

]]>2016-05-10T14:48:00ZProfessor David Wills Examines Space and Place at NYU Tel Avivhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/5/4/Professor_David_Wills_Examines_Space_and_Place_at_NYU_Tel_Aviv
David Clinton Wills, Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, will teach a new Dean&rsquo;s Global Honors Seminar in New York and Tel Aviv in fall 2016. The seminar will combine a semester-long course In New York with a one ...David Clinton Wills, Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, will teach a new Dean’s Global Honors Seminar in New York and Tel Aviv in fall 2016. The seminar will combine a semester-long course In New York with a one week research-travel component at NYU Tel Aviv in January. Students will engage in a comparative exploration of space and place as they relate to human connections, the body as a medium, and cultural practices. Professor Wills will leverage experiential learning opportunities in both locations to examine themes of identity and difference, perception and embodiment, architecture and landscape, and social media. Steinhardt Global interviewed Professor Wills to learn more about this course and his interest in Israel.

What inspired this course?The inspiration of this course is the aim to craft broadening perspectives on the relationship between cultural existence and one’s habitation of space. What does it mean to be in a place, to have presence, and have presence be disclosed to you? This course asks how do people, through their practices and their being in the world, form relationships with the spaces and places that they inhabit; affecting those spaces and being affected by them as well.

Why study in Israel?We must study in the entire world. Israel is a part of that world that particularly evidences narratives of history, religion, politics, culture, and how these multiples strands intersect and affect each other with ramifications for the world at large. Israel is unlike any place in the world and like every place in the world. Through studying in Israel, we’re studying the world. I am reminded of William Blake, who writes, “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.” And Israel does have a lot of sand!

What advice would you give a student considering study abroad?Do it!

Why is a global perspective important in the study of Media, Culture, and Communication?It’s important to realize that experiencing the world in nearly its totality is something that is readily possible through the vast array of channels that are available to us. We’re able to be in almost every place on planet. Being able to develop a schema of the planet, or to think that the totalizing concept of the globe is something that one can have a cognizance of, is an amazing thing. A global perspective allows a nearly bird’s eye view of how we’re all interconnected and the study of Media, Culture, and Communication is about this interconnection and one’s place in it.

How has your time in Israel influenced your academic work?My time in Israel has influenced my academic work quite significantly and it has been an extraordinary benefit to developing my current book project entitled Continuity in Life, as well as developing my classroom pedagogy. Being able to cultivate and develop my work on identity, with regards to vectors of race, nation, sex, and gender, from the experiences that I’ve had in Israel, has been extremely productive for my research and my teaching, as Israel is a complexly challenging site of these narratives.

What other courses are you teaching next year?I’ll be teaching a course, Queer Identity and Popular Culture, as well as a course on Gender and Communication.

What was your favorite course as an undergraduate?I greatly enjoyed all of the coursework of my undergraduate career and I think that my favorite course was Documentary Writing. In documenting, I was exposed to the need for sensitivity in attuning oneself to alterity, I learned the importance of striving towards the unveiling of truth and most of all, I heard the demand to encounter and represent with as little inflection of my own perception as possible. Although my bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in Philosophy taught me how to question, in documentary writing, I learned how to listen and how to write that sound.

]]>2016-05-04T10:16:00ZStudent Award Winners 2016http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/4/19/Student_Award_Winners_2016
The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication is happy to announce the winners of its undergraduate and graduate departmental awards. To feature this talented group, we updated the classic Proust Questionnaire and collected their candid ...The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication is happy to announce the winners of its undergraduate and graduate departmental awards. To feature this talented group, we updated the classic Proust Questionnaire and collected their candid responses.

Hessa Al-Mohannadi, MA | Outstanding Service to the Department Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Everything I read in MCC Core. My background wasn't in media studies so reading the MCC Core readings really clicked for me. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Michel FoucaultWhat news source could you not live without? Google Alerts!Who is your biggest scholarly crush? Don't think I have a specific one in mind but anyone who is passionate and excited by what they are teaching/researching What subject incites your curiosity the most? Identity politics and globalization If you could buy any URL, what would the address be? For practical reasons I would go with my name. I wish I had more of a creative answer but I can't think of anything else!Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? I found that taking notes on my laptop is the easiest way to stay organized and reduce wastage "I procrastinate by cleaning my apartment, doing house chores, and watching netflix.""My dream job would be a professor!" "My best day at NYU was probably my first day at orientation or graduation day.""Living in NYC is a learning experience.""My MCC degree is going to help me with my PhD and hopefully finding a job in the future.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was my whole study abroad experience in London."

John Bautista, BS | Outstanding Service to the Department Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi CoatesIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Erving GoffmanWhat news source could you not live without? Too many... Twitter helps consolidate them!Who is your biggest scholarly crush? Michel FoucaultWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? Intersectional feminism If you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.beyonce.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? Pencil and paper all the way."I procrastinate by cooking.""My dream job would be a talent agent." "My best day at NYU was when I gave my first tour of NYU. I remember my excitement when I visited, so it was great to pass it on.""Living in NYC is delicious.""My MCC degree is going to help me promote diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was the history and development of disability rights and activism. Shout-out to Professor Mara Mills!"

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Professor Allen Feldman's Formation of Violence and Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes. These two books, together, helped me make sense of some of my most poignant life experiences. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. I'd also like to meet Lydia Davis to chat about her short stories.What news source could you not live without? I save articles from various sources in an app called Pocket and read them later. But I do rely on The Hindu a lot. Who is your biggest scholarly crush? Arundhati Roy. Always. What subject incites your curiosity the most? Art & PoliticsIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.yugpath.com—That's the name of the organization that my friends and I started. It's available, I just need to buy it. Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? Laptop/Ipad (Notability app) in class, but I need paper and pen to make all kinds of flowcharts while writing papers. "I procrastinate by listening to Indian classical music. I always end up reading about the artist, writing about the piece of music, and sharing it with friends.""My dream job would be working with classical musicians and dancers to revamp the traditional literature of these forms to address contemporary political issues.""My best day at NYU was when I discovered the "Ask NYU Libraries" feature. These faceless magicians are some of the most incredible heroes at NYU.""Living in NYC is often incredibly difficult and demoralizing. But, in rare moments, it is also exceptionally beautiful.""My MCC degree is going to help me think critically, identify art and politics in everyday life, and engage with the society in meaningful ways.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class waswhy we all look so terrible in our photo IDs. According to Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff, it is because 'that's how the State sees us.'"

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? The Printing Revolution by Elizabeth Eisenstein and the entire syllabus for Professor Nicole Starosielski's Digital Media & Materiality seminar. Especially the chapter Kernel: Code in Time and Space in Adrian Mackenzie's Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Walter BenjaminWhat news source could you not live without?The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC

Who is your biggest scholarly crush?Bertrand Russell and Naomi KleinWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? How people create meaning with the tools they are given in their daily lives.If you could buy any URL, what would the address be? anyurl.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?Paper!!!! Typing doesn’t allow things to sink in to your critical thinking repertoire as much. "I procrastinate by reading classical novels.""My dream job would be making books by Walden Pond (writing and stitching them).""My best day at NYU was when Nicole Starosielski said she would be my thesis adviser. She was walking very quickly, and I ran after her to be sure she had heard what I was asking.""Living in NYC is just like home! (I am from 18th street and 3rd.)""My MCC degree is going to help me innovate/participate in anything. Media is involved in every aspect of our lives, so it's a great opening for a variety of disciplines."

"The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was that wireless really just means the wires are hidden."

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon. This book does a fantastic (and jarring) job of laying out the long term environmental and ethical consequences that flow from technological societies. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Lewis Mumford, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Gunther Anders, Jacques Ellul and too many others to name. Don't make me pick!What news source could you not live without?I think I'd be much happier if I went without any news sources. That being said: Democracy Now! and Economic Update.

Who is your biggest scholarly crush?That's a rather personal question.What subject incites your curiosity the most? Attempts by humans to readjust themselves in order to survive in the human built world. If you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.luddite.com "No general but Ludd means the poor any good."Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?I used to take notes by Morse code, but a professor objected to the incessant tapping, so now I use a pen and a notebook."I procrastinate by writing science fiction, re-arranging my books, playing the accordion (the more I practice the worse I get!), and working full time.""My dream job would be when I was a child I used to tell people that my dream job was to be a Rabbi on a pirate ship, if that opportunity presented itself I think I’d still take it. Failing that, I imagine that being the captain of a Federation starship would be an interesting adventure, until I get assimilated by the Borg, that is.""My best day at NYU was when a paper I had written in the Media and the Environment course was accepted for presentation at SHOT’s annual conference. Though being a TA in the department has been an, ongoing, awesome experience!""Living in NYC is overrated.""My MCC degree is going to help me to incorporate discussions of media into my broader research examining the critique of technology and resistance to technological change."

"The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was that resistance is not futile. It just feels like it is."

Amy Lu, BS | Outstanding Service to the Department Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Zygmunt Bauman's theories on postmodern consumerism, armchair activism, and political inequalityIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Roméo DallaireWhat news source could you not live without?TechCrunch, Fast Company, The New York Times, The New YorkerWho is your biggest scholarly crush?Professor Colm O'Shea who continuously challenged me to dig deeper into my views of the world, and how to pen those thoughts onto paperWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? The emotion-driven relationship between brand and consumerIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be?www.techcrunch.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?Pencil and paper always!"I procrastinate byreading wikipedia spoilers, cleaning, reading my kindle, playing video games, and watching Friends....this is a lot.""My dream job would beworking in consumer insights and strategy at a tech company whose mission statement, values, and impact goals align with mine.""My best day at NYU was when I got to attend Advertising Week as part of my Disney internship and hear from some of the most talented professionals in the tech industry.""Living in NYC isexciting, exhausting, challenging, motivating, and sprinting to make it onto the N/R train.""My MCC degree is going to help methink critically, be curious, and consistently analyze the always changing relationship between society and the media/technology landscape.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class wasFashion and Power—Linking Bauman's theories with fashion politics in our consumerist society and present day political strategies."

Magdalena Sabat, PhD | Distinguished Dissertation Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Edward Said's OrientalismIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Clifford GeertzWhat news source could you not live without?Local news, I love the construction of everyday drama and the animal storiesWho is your biggest scholarly crush?Debra SatzWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? space/astronauts/Star Trek NG/sci-fiIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.omgcatsinspace.com (You made me think of trying to buy it!)Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? pencil/ paper"I procrastinate by cleaning/daydreaming/thinking about zombie apocalypse.""My dream job would be a 17th century pirate ship captain!""My best day at NYU was when I met my cohort.""Living in NYC islike going to the dentist, until you’re in the chair you don’t know if you’re a ok doing great or need a root canal!""My MCC degree is going to help me engage with the media, culture, and communication community in Toronto."

"The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was 'The dream of communication stops short of all the hard stuff. Sending clear messages might not make for better relations; we might like each other less the more we understood about one another.'" (John Durham Peters)

Rebeca Herrero Saenz, MA | Distinguished Thesis Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Tricks of the Trade by Howard BeckerIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Jane AddamsWhat news source could you not live without?Publico.es and eldiario.es, to keep up with what happens back homeWho is your biggest scholarly crush?Howard BeckerWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? The social and cultural dimensions of mental healthIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.cats.com, because I am a crazy cat ladyNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? pen and paper"I procrastinate by watching DIY YouTube tutorials and sometimes putting them in practice.""My dream job would be a full-time professor.""My best day at NYU was when I turned in my thesis. Accomplishment feels good.""Living in NYC isunpredictable (and expensive).""My MCC degree is going to help me get into a Ph.D. program!"

"The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was the many ways in which artifacts have politics."

Luke Stark, PhD | Outstanding Teacher Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? To be entirely honest, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (read while in line to see a Star Wars prequel). I thought, "I have to figure out where this guy teaches..."If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Susan Leigh Starr (a genius of STS/infrastructure studies, now sadly deceased)What news source could you not live without?Talking Points MemoWho is your biggest scholarly crush?Eden Medina. Or Arlie Russell Hochschild. Or Elizabeth Wilson. Or...What subject incites your curiosity the most? HistoryIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.stark.orgNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? iPad (my writing's illegible even to me)"I procrastinate by rearranging my book shelves and sorting my PDFs.""My dream job would be a Las Vegas lounge singer. Or, you know, the whole academic career thing...""My best day at NYU was when I went on a field trip to a museum on the Upper East side as a TA, and in doing so met my future fiance.""Living in NYC isbetter than going back to Party City, but probably more expensive.""My MCC degree is going to help me self-diagnose, and give medical advice on airplanes. Or, you know, the whole academic career thing..."

"The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was that the people I go to school with are the smartest people I know."

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Lacan's Mirror StageIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Susan SontagWhat news source could you not live without?The New YorkerWho is your biggest scholarly crush?I promise I'm not trying to be a teacher's pet, but my thesis adviser Marita Sturken.What subject incites your curiosity the most? Dark TourismIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be?mediastudies.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? Pencil and paper "I procrastinate byPinterest! Though my studies always creep in...Recently procrastination led me to browsing a stranger's Pinterest and sandwiched between "Hair" and "Nails" was a board dedicated to "9/11"...Not sure what to make of it...""My dream job would be working as a professor.""My best day at NYU waswhen I read all of the positive comments from the students in my recitation. It was very rewarding to hear that I was a helpful TA to them.""Living in NYC ismore fun than I expected.""My MCC degree is going to help mebecome a Professor one day!""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class wasthat activism can be so many different things, not just participating in a 'traditional' protest. Reading is activism, walking is activism, and so on. I learned this in several of Nick Mirzoeff's classes, and it still feels like a really exciting and liberating fact /possibility to me."

John Watson, MA | Outstanding Service to the Department Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" is one that I keep returning to. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Stuart HallWhat news source could you not live without?The New York Times is cliche. But, The New York Times. Who is your biggest scholarly crush?Jane McGonigalWhat subject incites your curiosity the most?Drawing connections between (dis)ability and video gamesIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be?www.theotherjohnwatson.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?Always pen and paper "I procrastinate byadding things to my cart on Amazon and then deleting them from my cart.""My dream job would be working with a highly-skilled team of dogs and dolphins on important issues.""My best day at NYU waswhen I began receiving emails that referred to me as "Professor Watson." "Living in NYC isdifferent every day.""My MCC degree is going to help methink critically about digital design challenges and instill a mission for accessibility throughout my career.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class washow to conduct my body during a political sit-in."

Kelli Wheatley, BS | Academic Achievement Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industries." I didn't even have a solid grasp of what capitalism meant when I came to NYU, so this piece was a huge eye-opener when it comes to how the capitalist system and entertainment production are so intricately linked. If you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be?Judith Butler! I'd love to hear her perspective on the effectuality of the current "feminist wave" and how she thinks we're doing as a culture on breaking down gender stereotypes. What news source could you not live without?CNN. Boring, yes, but it tells me what I need to know! Who is your biggest scholarly crush?Michel Foucault. From authors to panopticons to biopower, his work has come up in almost every class I've taken and it is always so fascinating! Plus he's French.What subject incites your curiosity the most? Higher education. I hope to get my Master's Degree in Higher Education Administration and Student Affairs.If you could buy any URL, what would the address be?www.thebrowneyedschoolgirl.com Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?Pencil and paper! And definitely pencil, not pen. "I procrastinate byNapping...a girl's gotta sleep!""My dream job would bean Admissions Counselor at a top-tier university.""My best day at NYU was whenI gave my first tour of the campus as an Admissions Ambassador. I've never been so proud to bleed violet and to share my love for the school with prospective students!""Living in NYC isstimulating, exciting, enthralling, ever-evolving and life-changing.""My MCC degree is going to help meapply the various communication skills I have studied to bettering my presence as a professional, and use my media-analyzing skills to be a critical consumer of mass media content.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class wasabout French media and culture in my Global Media Seminar in Paris. It is so different than ours, and really helped me navigate the city while I was studying there."

Carlin Wing, PhD | Distinguished Dissertation Award

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in TimeIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Margaret CavendishWhat news source could you not live without? Public Radio Who is your biggest scholarly crush? Douglas AdamsWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? GravityIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? cakeisgr8.com Note taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper?Notebook/pen to laptop to pen/paper printouts back to laptop back to notebook..."I procrastinate bystaring at walls.""My dream job would bea deep sea diver.""My best day at NYU was whenKouross brought me a birthday cupcake.""Living in NYC issomething good.""My MCC degree is going to help meconnect the dots.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class wasthat in the 19th century blocks of ice were harvested from ponds around the Boston area and shipped to Hawaii (thanks Hi'ilei Hobart for teaching me about how we come to have tastes for cool temperatures)."

What reading produced the biggest aha moment? Foucault's The History of SexualityIf you could meet any scholar, dead or alive, who would it be? Michel FoucaultWhat news source could you not live without? BBC Global NewsWho is your biggest scholarly crush? Judith ButlerWhat subject incites your curiosity the most? China's gender and family issuesIf you could buy any URL, what would the address be? www.respectwomen.comNote taking: laptop, iPad, or pencil/paper? Pencil and paper"I procrastinate by perfectionism tendencies.""Living in NYC is enjoying and getting used to something unexpected.""My dream job would be teaching in a higher educational institution in mainland China.""My best day at NYU was when my teammates and I worked out an activism project entitled 'Depression Impression.'""My MCC degree is going to help me be a more interesting person.""The coolest thing I learned in an MCC class was being aware that there exists a variety of world views and respecting different lifestyles from mine."

]]>2016-04-19T14:43:00ZNicole Starosielski Receives Award For Best First Book From The Society for Cinema and Media Studieshttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/4/1/Nicole_Starosielski_Receives_Best_First_Book_Award_from_the_Society_for_Cinema_and_Media_Studies
At its annual spring conference, SCMS&nbsp;announced the selection of&nbsp;MCC Assistant Professor&nbsp;Nicole Starosielski's The Undersea Network&nbsp;as&nbsp;the best&nbsp;first book published in the field of film and media studies in the last ...At its annual spring conference, SCMS announced the selection of MCC Assistant Professor Nicole Starosielski's The Undersea Network as the best first book published in the field of film and media studies in the last year. The work examines the vast underwater infrastructure undergirding the world's Internet.

In reviewing the book, scholar Jonathan Sterne writes that "The Undersea Network will transform our understanding of the networks that make modern media possible."

Starosielski follows the Internet's submerged cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the beaches of the South Pacific, charting the cultural, political, historical, and environmental dimensions that are entangled in this material information system.

In addition to this recognition, Starosielski and Lisa Parks together received the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award for their volume Signal Traffic. The award honors an "outstanding example of newly edited work involving the insights of an editor or co-editor in bringing together the best work of multiple scholars in a single volume."

]]>2016-04-01T12:05:00ZFred Turner is the 2016 LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholarhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/3/14/Fred_Turner_is_2016_LeBoff_Distinguished_Visiting_Scholar
MCC is pleased to announce that Stanford Professor Fred Turner will lead a special graduate seminar entitled&nbsp;Cybernetics and Its Histories later this month. The course will begin with&nbsp;Norbert Wiener's coining of the term in 1948, offering ...MCC is pleased to announce that Stanford Professor Fred Turner will lead a special graduate seminar entitled Cybernetics and Its Histories later this month. The course will begin with Norbert Wiener's coining of the term in 1948, offering a look at the cold war history of cybernetics and tracing its evolution into contemporary technoculture. Turner will deliver the LeBoff Public Lecture "The Democratic Surround: Management by Media from the Cold War to Facebook" at NYU on March 31.

The LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program is made possible through the generous support of Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of three books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013); From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist.

]]>2016-03-14T16:16:00ZMCC Symposium Examines Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/2/25/MCC_Symposium_Examines_Technology_Privacy_and_the_Future_of_Education_
The Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium, hosted by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, brings together educational specialists, journalists, and academics to open a dialogue around the ...The Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium, hosted by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, brings together educational specialists, journalists, and academics to open a dialogue around the pedagogical, legal, and ethical repercussions of the use of new technologies in educational environments.

The symposium will take place on Friday, March 4 from 2-6 p.m. at 239 Greene Street, Floor 8.

The symposium, which is free and open to the public, is part of a series of conversations in celebration of NYU Steinhardt’s 125th anniversary. Attendees must register through the event’s website; space is limited.

The event is made possible by a gift from Microsoft. Join the conversation with @mccNYU and @nyusteinhardt at #edtechprivacy.

]]>2016-02-25T17:12:00ZHelen Nissenbaum and Cornell Researcher Awarded NSF Grant to Study Privacyhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2016/1/13/Helen_Nissenbaum_and_Cornell_Researcher_Awarded_NSF_Grant_to_Study_Privacy
MCC Professor Helen Nissenbaum and Cornell computer scientist Deborah Estrin have received $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled A Research Agenda to Explore Privacy in "Small Data" Applications.
Together they will ...MCC Professor Helen Nissenbaum and Cornell computer scientist Deborah Estrin have received $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled A Research Agenda to Explore Privacy in "Small Data" Applications.

Together they will establish a framework for considering privacy systematically during system design and development, thereby addressing a growing call by policy-makers, public interest advocates, and academic researchers for "privacy by design."

Nissenbaum and Estrin will base their work on "contextual integrity”—a theory developed by Nissenbaum, whereby a right to privacy is a right to appropriate flow of personal information. They will carefully map information flows in selected instances of "small data” systems: systems that monitor digital traces of one's daily activities such as sending email, buying groceries, or ordering take-out in order to offer insight to users into their habits and health goals. Because certain design patterns can yield functional systems that leak information inappropriately, Nissenbaum and Estrin’s work will provide guidance on how to ensure this does not happen.

Their research forms part of the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her work spans social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and digital media.

]]>2016-01-13T15:13:00ZQ&A with Arjun Appadurai on new book “Banking on Words”http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2015/12/3/QA_with_Arjun_Appadurai_on_new_book_Banking_on_Words
With Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (University of Chicago Press), Arjun Appadurai, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, delves into the culture of derivative finance and ...With Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (University of Chicago Press), Arjun Appadurai, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, delves into the culture of derivative finance and argues that the 2008 market collapse should be viewed ultimately as a failure of language. Long interested in “the sociology of economic action,” Appadurai’s latest project offers a probing cultural analysis of the global economic sphere. Professor Appadurai speaks to some of the book’s central themes in the following Q&A:

You conceive of the market collapse as a failure of language, more specifically the dissolution of the "promise" as a performative speech act. What distinguishes the promises of derivative finance (or architecture of promises, as you refer to it) from prior capitalistic traditions?

The primary difference between this architecture and previous similar ones is that it involves a contradiction between kept promises (those between derivative traders when they buy and sell "promises" to one another) and broken promises, such as in credit default swaps where derivatives make or lose on money based on the likelihood of broken promises in deals between others.

You depict derivative finance as a technique for slicing and dicing the individual and then "reassembling these divided bits of the person" into a subject for financial gain. You liken this to the state of the "dividual," an erosion of the western idea of the individual. Yet in this concept of the dividual, you also identify a radical form of politics to counteract the financial market's "predatory dividualism." Can you outline this new form of politics and articulate the source of your optimism?

This potentially progressive way of bringing together "dividuals" in new ways to challenge the domination of banks, corporations and finance professionals, can already be seen in the effort of various unions and pension funds to take charge of their own investments, the various student movements to re-structure student debt and the efforts of progressive hedge funds to distribute their profits to their stakeholders in a just manner.

In all these cases, that part of ourselves which is "chopped up" into our profiles as students, workers, debtors, homeowners etc. can be re-possessed and mobilized in a manner which challenges the domination of predatory financial elites.

Throughout the book you note with regret the limited engagement between the fields of economics, anthropology, sociology. Indeed you extend "an open invitation" to develop a new field of inquiry, one in which culture and finance are not divorced from each other. Which questions might benefit most from such interdisciplinary dialogue?

There are many topics which would benefit from this engagement and some of them are already being discussed by economists, anthropologists and others. Examples include: the question of the meaning of money and why money seems always to produce desire for more money, even apart from what money can buy; the issue of the cultural horizon of aspirations and how aspirations for a better life can come out of very different approaches to increasing one's wealth; the problem of risk and of how different classes, cultures and countries present highly different levels of tolerance towards economic risk; the study of innovation and the extent to which innovation is a product of history, culture and public support of innovative thinking.

You mention that your fascination with the sociology of economics began in graduate school and has informed much of your subsequent research and scholarship. Can you describe some of the intellectual pathways this involvement has taken over the decades?

I was introduced to the work of Max Weber in my first year of graduate school at The University of Chicago and he has been my model of how not to recognize boundaries between sociology, politics, economics and world history. Equally, I have been greatly influenced by Clifford Geertz's work on the economies of Indonesia and Morocco in his great studies of agriculture and bazaars in the 1960's, which showed how economic decisions are always shot through with cultural assumptions, styles and values. Lastly, Albert Hirschman's way of thinking about the passions and the interests in his studies of markets, parties and politics remain a model of economics with a human face.

In my own work, I have pursued the relationship between culture and economy starting in the early 1980’s in a series of articles on the culture of agriculture in India, in my work on “the social life of things,” in dialogues with development economists about the “capacity to aspire,” culminating in this most recent book on the logic of derivative finance.

]]>2015-12-03T09:03:00ZMA Student Takes Home Award for Best Graduate Paper at NYSCA Conferencehttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2015/10/22/MA_Student_Takes_Home_Award_for_Best_Graduate_Paper_at_the_New_York_State_Communication_Association_Conference
MCC student Audrey Turner received the award for her paper entitled "Selfies as Lacan's Mirror Stage," which she presented at last weekend's New York State Communication Association conference.
The paper, written for MCC Professor Feldman's seminar ...MCC student Audrey Turner received the award for her paper entitled "Selfies as Lacan's Mirror Stage," which she presented at last weekend's New York State Communication Association conference.

The paper, written for MCC Professor Feldman's seminar Politics of the Gaze, addresses the ways in which selfies re-imagine and re-frame the self in the digital world. Referencing theories by Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes, Audrey examines the phenomena of people who insert themselves into sites of historical violence and trauma by posing for self portraits at such landmarks as Auschwitz or Ground Zero. The paper then looks at images which proliferated on social media in response to the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Often carrying hashtags like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown or #HoodiesOn, these "solidarity" selfies work to subvert the framing of black bodies as necessarily violent or threatening.

Turner is currently expanding this work into a master's thesis, researching the ways in which young girls negotiate their identities within digital spaces. Audrey says she's fascinated by how young women use selfies to control "how their self-image is produced, circulated, framed, and presented."

Several other MCC MA students had papers accepted at the NYSCA conference: Shawn Bedassie, Hessa Al-Mohannadi, Yuanjie Grace Xia, Joanne Chu Yuan Ng, and Bria Suh. The students attended the conference with MCC Professor Deborah Borisoff, who received special recognition in the program for her scholarship, teaching, and mentorship.